You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
“Hannibal” has been renewed for a second season, NBC announced today.
The Bryan Fuller series, starring Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen and Laurence Fishburne, debuted in April to 4.4 million viewers and a 1.6 rating, maintaining fairly solid numbers despite a timeslot that put it up against CBS’ successful “Elementary” and ABC’s juggernaut “Scandal.”
In a recent interview with E! Online, Fuller admitted that the odds were in their favor for renewal: “I know that we are a cost-efficient show so we’re not hard to pick up. That’s a nice way of saying we’re a bargain show! (laughs) Hannibal was really well-produced, we have a fantastic team and our crew in Toronto was just knocking it out of the park.”
Joe Namath was one of football’s first marquee stars, best known for his New York Jets’ 1969 win over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III — a victory the quarterback guaranteed beforehand. “Broadway Joe,” who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985, played most of his career with the Jets. But lately, Namath, who turns 70 on Friday, has been highly critical of his former team.
Namath recently caught up with The Huffington Post to talk about Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, the NFL’s rule changes and why his publicly tenuous relationship with Jets owner Woody Johnson is not as bad as it seems.
Define your legacy on the game of pro football.
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Cooper Union’s Wednesday commencement ceremony drew perhaps more symbols of Occupy Wall Street-style activism than any other graduation in recent years, even as New York Mayor City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — one of the richest men in the country — delivered the school’s commencement address.
Students are outraged over the school’s decision, announced in April, to break a 150-year-old tradition and charge undergraduate tuition.
Cooper Union President Jamshed Barucha has borne the brunt of much of the protesters’ anger because, they say, he’s the one who raised the possibility of charging tuition almost immediately after taking office in 2011. Following the official decision on charging tuition, students took over Barucha’s office on May 8, where a group of at least a dozen remain.
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A good piece of art makes you appreciate what it means to be alive, and Indiana-based cinematographer Samuel Orr’s spectacular short film about cicadas does just that.
In order to make the video, Orr, a 42-year-old natural history filmmaker and time-lapse photographer, told The Huffington Post he’s spent the past six years filming more than 200 hours of cicadas in various stages of their life cycles in a handful of midwestern states.
The effect is nothing short of amazing.
Tracy Morgan is returning to TV with a new FX pilot, titled “Death Pact.”
Morgan, who starred on NBC’s “30 Rock” for seven seasons, will play a “formerly lazy, pot-dealing assistant high school coach.” The character returns to his hometown as a decorated war hero and runs into three down-on-their-luck friends and former students, who he brings into his new “radical self-help philosophy, which involves harsh consequences for failure.”
“Death Pact” was co-created by Rob Long and Tad Safran, who will serve as executive producers and writers. Eric and Kim Tannenbaum will also serve as executive producers.
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By Oren Dorrell and Ahmed Kwider
USA Today
AMMAN, Jordan (RNS) The Syrian civil war is increasingly drawing in nations across the Middle East, a regionwide conflict that threatens to pit world powers against each other and Muslim against Muslim.
It wasn’t all that long ago that we first got our mitts on the Blade 2.0, and today we came to grips with two new third-gen Razer gaming laptops: the Blade Pro and a fresh 14-inch model. On the outside, both of these Blades favor their elders — both sport matte black anodized-aluminum shells with Razer’s trademark Slimer-green accents and diminutive power bricks. Where they differ from previous Blades is in what lies beneath that familiar facade.
Each will come with Intel’s fourth-generation Core-i7 quad-core silicon (a 47W chip in the Pro and a 37W CPU in the 14-incher) and a freshly revealed NVIDIA GTX 765M GPU, plus bigger batteries than ever before. If it wasn’t already obvious, let us spell it out for you: a big reason for these changes is electrical economy. One of the biggest complaints with any portable gaming rig is its battery life, or more accurately, lack thereof. A more efficient CPU and GPU, plus an extra 10 to 14 Wh of juice means that Razer is acutely aware of the problem and is taking steps to fix it. Razer ran the MobileMark 2007 battery test on the new 14-inch Blade and it lasted six hours. Of course, we’ll have to wait until we review these new rigs to discover real-world battery life, but at least on paper, the two new Blades will be a bit more miserly.
Tomas Young, a paralyzed Iraq veteran who had planned to end his life after years of fighting pain and complications from war wounds, has decided it’s not yet time to go.
“I decided I was going to hold on as long as I can until it becomes too unbearable for me,” Young told the Kansas City Star in an interview earlier this month, saying that he would no longer ascribe a date to any decision about his life.
In February, Young revealed news of his choice to an audience attending a screening of the documentary “Body of War,” a film about his recovery from being shot through the spine days into his first tour of duty. Later that year, Young began rejecting the nourishment that kept him living after numerous painful surgeries and treatments, he told stunned attendees in a Skype appearance with his wife, Claudia Cuellar. The decision would kill him.
Judith Hill was shockingly eliminated from “The Voice” this week and no one was more appalled than her coach Adam Levine, who notoriously said, “I hate this country” when Judith and his other team member Sarah Simmons found themselves at the bottom.
Judith’s elimination from “The Voice” was easily the most surprising departure the show has seen thus far in Season 4 since the former backup singer for Michael Jackson was an early favorite. Judith was supposed to be Jackson’s duet partner for his “This Is It” tour, which he was working on until he died unexpectedly.
“It was crazy. It felt like ‘The Hunger Games’ up there on that thing and you just never know,” Judith said on “Today” of her elimination (above).
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